Perfectly wrong. Not only do you not need a google account, you also don't need any of their software that hasn't been released as Open Source.
Start by installing CyanogenMod. This will give you a fully functional base system, without any google applications. You do get a fully functional web browser, which still puts you well ahead of feature phones; no appstore, though. To fix that part, you can then add F-Droid, an alternative Android appstore focused on free software programs, given you a convenient way to install various mapping applications, more web browsers, pdf readers, games, or what-have-you. The selection isn't anything close to what you get on Google Play, of course. So there's a price. But you can do it. And you do end up with something that's still a lot more useful than a feature phone.
Certainly the common server-side implementations right now like to use it with encryption, but I can find no mention of that being mandatory in the SPDY IETF draft.
In particular, section 2.1 has all of the following to say about upper-level protocols:
2.1. Session (Connections)
The SPDY framing layer (or "session") runs atop a reliable transport
layer such as TCP [RFC0793]. The client is the TCP connection
initiator. SPDY connections are persistent connections.
SPDY has protocol elements that are only useful when it's wrapped by TLS/SSL, but then you aren't forced to use those on a given connection, either.
Higher than for Foxconn workers. This has been reported by various media, just google it. The wikipedia article cites this The Economist article, for instance.
(Note: I am neither of the AC ancestors, but I'm pretty sure I understand their position, so I'll try to explain it regardless)
The critical difference here is that those Chinese workers are/not/ slaves. They are not forced into taking jobs at foxconn; they take these positions voluntarily, just like people in western countries do, because they think it's a favorable trade for them.
Why do they do this? Because as bad as the working conditions and pay at companies like Foxconn are by western standards, they are very competitive compared to the local alternatives. This point is crucial: Foxconn are not exploiting people in the sense that all else being equal, the people who work for them would be better off just not doing so.
You can make an argument that people living in sufficient poverty to make such a deal favorable is a terrible thing, and I'd agree with that. However, destroying Foxconn's business model by preventing them from selling to western countries does nothing directly to fix these people's poverty; in fact it makes it worse, by reducing the pool of jobs available to them (and not just randomly reducing it; you're taking away some of the best jobs in the pool!).
As an analogy, think of how you'd react if people in a hypothetical country that's even more wealthy than your's decided that your working conditions are far too horrible for your pay, and somehow stopped jobs like the one you have right from being offered anymore, resulting in you having to choose a worse job instead. Would that make your life better? Would you be happy about it? It's the same thing here.
The above is how the simple economic argument goes. Real economies and societies are complicated, of course, and there's several vectors by which driving Foxconn out of business oculd potentially improve the situation for common workers in China. But those aren't clear to me (and aren't clear to various other people who've looked at the issue) - the direct, obvious and robust effect is strongly negative. If you're going to argue that there are other effects compensating for it, it would be good to present your reasoning or link to other people arguing for the above reasoning being incorrect.
Still need to know if you've passed the six month mark yet. ^_^
Fair enough, I should have been more specific there. I've been using the system I'm writing this on (and mentioned in my previous post) since April 2011, and it was a replacement for another Intel GPU notebook which I had been using since August 2009. So that's a bit over 2 years on Intel GPUs, now.:)
And how is the OpenCL support on those GPUs?
I haven't had a reason to look very hard for it, but as far as I can tell the answer is "nonexistent". According to Intel's relevant FAQ entry they don't support running OpenCL code on any of their IGPs, including the newest and fanciest Sandy Bridge chips. They do have an implementation to run OpenCL on the CPU instead. I have no idea if using that approach gets you any performance benefits over just running equivalent x86_64 code on the same CPU.
I have yet to encounter anyone who has gone 6 months with an actual machine with an integrated Intel graphics chip-set, and not have them hunger for something better.
Hello lightknight, nice to encounter you.
I've been using Intel GPUs, specifically the Core 2 generation of them (my current one reports as "Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller"; using i915 kernel driver) for quite a while now. The computer I write this on also has an ATI GPU, but I've disabled that one permanently since the drivers are just too much of a pain to work with. The Intel GPU does what I need, and it does it with a minimum amount of fuss and instability. I aggressively avoid anything made by nvidia, since the free drivers situation for their hardware is even worse than with ATI/AMD.
Reports are that the Sandy Bridge GPUs are even better than Intel's earlier hardware generations, and that's definitely what I'll buy and use for my next systems.:)
Yes because there is a history of those with a lot of money being prepared to give any of it away
While you probably said this in irony, you are in fact, absolutely correct: There is such a history. See the appropriate wikipedia page for a short list of examples.
You don't seem to appreciate the deliberate way in which I phrased my response. I said I know of no such person. I did not claim that no such person exists.
I didn't mean to imply that you were lying. I was specifically worried about the NTS possibility since ESR is fairly well kown for his views among geekish libertarians, and so it struck me as relatively unlikely that someone with your understanding of the subject would be unaware of the existence of anarchist+libertarian views, to the extent of concluding that the association a result of propaganda from people opposed to libertarianism. I apologize if this came across as unnecessarily confrontational; no personal attacks were intended. I'm glad my post was informative for you:)
This is so easy to understand that I must conclude the numerous attempts to portray libertarian thought as some kind of anarcho-capitalism are simple demagoguery conducted by people who either have an agenda or have been propagandized by those who do. You do need a government to enforce notions like private property and civil rights and I know of no libertarian who would argue otherwise.
The other 1/4 (including the author of this FAQ) are out-and-out anarchists who believe that "limited government" is a delusion and the free market can provide better law, order, and security than any goverment monopoly.
Please don't respond with "anyone who says this isn't a real libertarian" unless you have very specific arguments that prevent it from falling into the category of No True Scotsman.
There are self-described libertarians who are also self-described anarchists. From the way many of them talk (see e.g. that FAQ), I have no particular reason they are twisting words either when calling themselves 'libertarian' nor when calling themselves 'anarchist'. Anarchism is an extreme of libertarian thought, but it is definitely part of the spectrum.
I thought the "dying in the fields" phrasing was an exaggeration you used for dramatic effect, but apparently it didn't originate with you. The argument I was talking about, which is a fairly standard libertarian one (and there's a good chance you've heard it anyway; I just want to avoid possible misunderstandings), runs roughly as follows: 1. Individual situations and lives are complex. Whether a voluntary exchange of goods is a net positive for someone depends on a lot of factors, many of which are much easier to evaluate for the individual involved than for any outside observer. The individual in question also typically has better incentives for getting the answer right than a third party, which (among other things) helps safeguard against many kinds of irrationality. 2. Therefore, not hurting people directly through commercial transactions is usually quite simple: Don't apply force, and be honest. Obviously forcing people into transactions is bad; robbing or raping people is clearly immoral. The same goes for defrauding them in voluntary transactions (by lying about your product, paying them with counterfeit money, or whatever). 3. Aside from those two obvious things, you're usually best off focusing on whether a given possible deal is good for you. If everyone does that, you get the people with the best information judging the efficiency of transactions, and most of such transactions will then end up mutually beneficial. 4. For similar reasons, judging that a given deal between two third party entities is directly morally bad requires that at least one of them is applying force, engaging in fraud, or catastrophically irrational (and also catastrophically more irrational than the actor making the judgement; unfortunately, it's very common for people to erroneously settle on this explanation). This is the standard argument as to why corporations running sweatshops (assuming the work contracts are voluntary, they don't inordinately pollute the environment, etc.) aren't necessarily doing anything immoral, and AFAIK it is valid.
Now, this is just about the direct moral consequences on the actors involved. By engaging in honest voluntary transactions, you might still be doing indirect harm by supporting an evil business. If you buy stuff from Sony, you're indirectly supporting DRM. If you buy NetApp devices, you're indirectly supporting software patent litigation. And if you do business with slavetraders, you're indirectly supporting slavery. If you were making this last point, then fair enough, but note that this really only applies where you expect your money to go to an evil organization - when you're dealing with someone who's just voluntarily (i.e., not being coerced through threat of violence by other individuals or similar) offering sexual services for money, there's nothing morally wrong about doing business with them. This also doesn't necessarily conflict with libertarian ideology very much. Libertarians don't typically condone forcing people into transactions, and many would agree that there's a role for government in preventing literal slavery (but note that "wage slavery" is really a horrible misnomer, and I'm not including that concept here).
And "want to do it", whatever the tedious capitalist he-may-be-interned-in-a-factory-but-at-least-he's-not-dying-in-the-fields armchair philosophers will tell you, must not be confused with "is desperate for money and willing to do it because there is no viable alternative".
Since you brought the "he-may-be-interned-in-a-factory-but-at-least-he's-not-dying-in-the-fields" argument up, it's safe to assume you've read/heard reasonable explanations of it, including why it works and how exactly the naive alternatives fail - so I won't repeat those here. I consider the aforementioned argument valid (and think it also applies to the situation depicted in your image). You have neither explained how/why it fails on theoretical grounds, nor provided specific empirical evidence for it failing in practice. A rejection this argument is a core part of the reasoning you outlined in your post, but I am aware of no effective rebuttals to it. If you have some, please provide them. Either original research or links to existing material are fine.
I disagree completely. Rummaging through my personal mass storage is a far more egregious violation of my personal rights than looking at every angle of my naked body (embarassing (and unpleasant for the observer) as that may be). Contrary to going over my primary mass storage, looking at my naked body doesn't tell you any of:
1. My stored passwords or other auth data (think SSH private keys). 2. My political views. 3. My taste in entertainment, pornography related or otherwise. 4. My browsing history. 5. My personal conversations going back half a decade. 6. Who my personal acquaintances are and their contact information. 7. What kind of work I do. 8. What kind of software I like to write in my free time, for my own use only.
Looking at my naked body doesn't come anywhere close in invasiveness, unless I wipe any and all remotely personal data on all storage devices I move through customs (I can always dowload it again later). Which I'll probably end up doing, when moving to or from any country with such egregious policies.
I agree with most of what you've written, but this is dubious:
3. Competitiveness between banks is no longer that important, this is a problem, small banks start losing out to bigger ones just based on this alone.
Actually, all else being equal small banks have a stability disadvantage. A concentrated customer base means you're less diversified, more exposed to local economic shocks, and more vulnerable to any economic shock because you have less of a capital buffer. FDIC unfairly advantages small banks by removing stability from the set of criteria customers care about. There are significant stability advantages to being a big organization, but no bank customer will care about those if all of their deposits are insured anyway.
Well, sure, but why should any of us pressure google into helping people in general to keep this stuff secret from insurers, then? It's not like we'll get them to only keep our own information private; this going to apply to all of the insurance company's customers, and we (like all their other customers) will be hit by the globally higher premiums. I can see why the subset of people who are currently exploiting this information asymmetry for profit (i.e. people with above-average risks who can keep that fact secret) would like to pressure google for more confidentiality about this, but everyone else shouldn't.
It's kinda like saying "I like to sell people lemons, so google should really not return any results related to the state of specific used cars, because that hurts my special interest." Lemon seller would like that, pretty much everyone else wouldn't, so why would people in general possibly support that kind of thing?
And just as a reminder, none of this touches concerns about keeping data from the government or employers, it's just about the "keep insurers in the dark" part. The other concerns would have to be addressed seperately, and I happen to think that keeping personal data out of the government's hands is in fact, a good idea.
(2) Things we wouldn't want our employers, potential insurance companies, or dictatorial governments to know about.
It sounds like the Google guy is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. He might have a point about (1), but his comment also seems to dismiss (2), and that's a real problem.
I'm with you on the governments and mostly on the employers (though one could argue that the latter are less important, since the market would tend to weed out inefficient discrimination).
But... why insurance companies? The idea of risk insurance is that you pay a large entity some money so as to put an upper bound on the worst things that might happen to you - i.e. there's some low-probability high-damage risks in your life (or venture), and you'd like to reduce the variance from those events. If you go into an insurance contract knowing something about the probability of the risk that the insurer doesn't, you're just trying to rip them off. And the insurance company will know about that possibility, adjust for it, and as a result demand higher premiums from all their customers, because their ability to tell the ones that are hiding information from the ones that aren't is imperfect. That ends up with people with a normal risk that want to buy a policy subsidizing those people that know privately that they have an elevated risk level. And of course then that leads to second order effects, with that kind of system attracting people with elevated risks, leading to higher premiums for everyone, etc.
Insurance works better if the insurance company has a good understanding of the risks they're actually insuring people against. Unilaterally withholding information of them can make individual sense, but is ultimately a negative-sum game.
hidden cameras in the voting booth; including those built into cellphones held by the voter [because the voter could be trying to prove what (s)he voted [in order to sell her/his vote or avoid retaliation if s/he did not vote as instructed].
Trivial to fix: Hand out as many ballots to each voter as they ask for, but only allow them to drop one envelope into the urn. They can make as many fake votes as they want, and photograph them however they like, but there's no way for them to prove they really dropped whatever they photographed into the urn, as opposed to throwing it away and filling out another ballot with their real vote.
My suspicion is that with common use of these exosceletons the percentages of groups that 'need' them will increase. The trend, of course, could be reversed if people took more care of the standard implementation of body functions. However, that would not create another growing revenue stream in the health care sector.
<sarcasm>Yes, and by the same token we should disallow the use of airplanes cars and bicycles for people who are physically capable of travelling the distance under their own power, no matter the cost or effort.</sarcasm>
What would be so bad about the scenario you describe? Taking good care of human muscles is a time-consuming, high-effort activity that many people don't find especially pleasurable, and that in fact isn't worth the results according to their own judgement. Historically people have increasingly offloaded activities previously done by human muscles to machines, freeing up time and energy to do other, more productive or pleasurable things.
I'd want one of those suits. Well, not right now, because right now they're still very expensive and likely error prone, but I'd definitely want one for daily use once they're in mass production and the major problems have been worked out. And not just for the sheer nerdiness. Who are you to decide for people what they should and shouldn't offload to machines? If these things get good and cheap enough, they will be used by a large part of the population, who will be happier and more productive as a result. The people who use them will happily pay the price to make and maintain the machines, just as we currently pay the price to do the same with cars. And we'll all be better off as a result.
It is, for instance, perfectly possible to replace all != with is not.
That's completely wrong. is not tests for identity, != tests for equality. For instance: >>> True != 1 False >>> True is not 1 True
Personally, I also think 'is not' is a horrible name for a python operator. Without this operator, the expression 'X is not Y' would still be valid Python, with a meaning equivalent to 'X is (not Y)' - which has a different meaning from 'X is not Y' in Python. Therefore, 'is not' could well be confusing to people who don't know it, but do know the other python operators. IMO, 'isnot' would have been a much better choice.
I imagine that the DECT link would just be carrying a nice SSL session, and it wouldn't much matter.
<sarcasm>Umm, yeah, that would work great.</sarcasm> Less facetiously, it would indeed have been possible to make things secure using SSL; but just using it isn't enough, at least as long as you use standard certificate authorities for auth. If you make your own, this particular crack probably wouldn't hit you.
How much is it going to cost per month or year to have a public ipv6 address. You can't say nothing because they will have to be allocated by someone in some way that not only tells routers where to direct stuff but to ensure that your traffic in LA isn't being routed to the same IP in Bermuda or Russia.
Well, right at this moment it costs... let me check now... nothing. If you don't believe me, check offers from existing ipv6 tunnel endpoint providers. sixxs, for instance, will offer you a (static)/48 network (that's 2**80 addresses, or more than the square of the entire ipv4 address space) for free. I can attest from personal experience that this works and is totally free as in beer, since I've been using their service for over two years without ever paying for it.
This is just an ipv6-through-ipv4 tunnel offer, so you do need working ipv4 connectivity to use it. Actual native ipv6 connectivity usually isn't gratis - but then the same applies for ipv4 uplinks. Global ipv4 addresses may be expensive, but ipv6 ones really aren't, and unless ISPs start introducing completely artificial scarcity on that front (which they might, being greedy businesses and all) they're not going to become scarce in the forseeable future.
Well, every other result would have been exactly as improbable. Irrelevant (warning: not entirely trivial statistical math follows). It's a matter of computing a conditional probability given certain evidence. Say you are only interested in the following two hypotheses: K: defendant obtained the key knowing what it was, and is trying to pass it off as coincidence N: The output really was coincidental.
The string matching the known key is a result of an empirical test; let's call that X: String matches a certain AACS key
Say you are willing to give the defendant the benefit of the doubt, and assume that of every 100 people to bring this argument in court, only one is lying. So you get the prior probabilities: P(N) = 0.99 P(K) = 0.01
The conditional probability fox X given that N is correct is easy to compute, and extremely small: P(X | N) = 1 / (2**128) =~ 2.94e-39 The other one is rather harder...but let's be conservative again, and assume that given intention to get at the key, the defendant only has a 10% chance of getting the right one. This is probably way too low. A realistic, higher, estimate, would result in a higher posterior probability of the defendant having gotten the key on purpose. P(X | K):= 0.1
We can now apply Bayes' Theorem to get at the probability we're interested in:
The last approximate equality is so close to 1 that the double floating-point arithmetic performed by the CPU of the system I'm writing this on doesn't know the difference anymore. Which means, that for all intents and purposes, even with the very defendant-friendly assumptions we've been making, the chance of these numbers matching by accident is so astronomically unlikely, that it's effectively certain that N is wrong.
You'll have a much better chance to covince any halfway-statistically competent court that someone framed the defendant by replacing their dd or kernel binary to output this key all the time (a possibility asider from either K or N), than you will of convincing them that this was a coincidence.
The output is pretty clearly that of a shell script being executed with 'set -x'. There's quite a bit of debug output there; aside from that, it seems to be doing little aside from setting a few environmental variables.
The ldd call would make sense for debug output, but interestingly it doesn't print anything like what ldd would. In fact, it likely isn't the usual ldd(1), but another binary that happens to have the same name; especially since the debug output stops there, suggesting that it didn't return and the following output was generated by that ldd process, or its children.
The Debug output could have been deactivated with a 'set +x', but before the deactivation went through that command itself would have been printed, so that's out. What is possible, though, is that the ldd was in fact the last command executed in a subshell, and the parent (which wasn't even necessarily a shell), wasn't set up to produce that kind of debug output.
A search for "seatapps" brings up very few results, those apparently being first-hand accounts of people who have seen similar screens during a flight, suggesting that the whole setup, as you suggested, highly specific and non-standard.
No, the GP post was wrong. Program correctness can be proved or disproved.
It can be proved in some special cases; in other words, there exist some algorithms that can be proved to compute a certain, known, computable function.
However, an arbitrary given algorithm (i.e. program) can not be proved to compute (or not compute) an arbitrary computable function. This is a fundamental result of theoretical Computer Science; solving this problem would be equivalent to solving the Halting Problem. This algorithmic unsolvability is commonly known as Rice's theorem.
Slashdot Mirror
Perfectly wrong. Not only do you not need a google account, you also don't need any of their software that hasn't been released as Open Source.
Start by installing CyanogenMod. This will give you a fully functional base system, without any google applications. You do get a fully functional web browser, which still puts you well ahead of feature phones; no appstore, though. To fix that part, you can then add F-Droid, an alternative Android appstore focused on free software programs, given you a convenient way to install various mapping applications, more web browsers, pdf readers, games, or what-have-you.
The selection isn't anything close to what you get on Google Play, of course. So there's a price.
But you can do it. And you do end up with something that's still a lot more useful than a feature phone.
N/T
Blocking all images is not sufficient for entirely blocking pornography. It'd still leave ASCII art, for instance.
Citation Needed.
Certainly the common server-side implementations right now like to use it with encryption, but I can find no mention of that being mandatory in the SPDY IETF draft.
In particular, section 2.1 has all of the following to say about upper-level protocols:
SPDY has protocol elements that are only useful when it's wrapped by TLS/SSL, but then you aren't forced to use those on a given connection, either.
Higher than for Foxconn workers. This has been reported by various media, just google it. The wikipedia article cites this The Economist article, for instance.
(Note: I am neither of the AC ancestors, but I'm pretty sure I understand their position, so I'll try to explain it regardless)
The critical difference here is that those Chinese workers are /not/ slaves. They are not forced into taking jobs at foxconn; they take these positions voluntarily, just like people in western countries do, because they think it's a favorable trade for them.
Why do they do this? Because as bad as the working conditions and pay at companies like Foxconn are by western standards, they are very competitive compared to the local alternatives. This point is crucial: Foxconn are not exploiting people in the sense that all else being equal, the people who work for them would be better off just not doing so.
You can make an argument that people living in sufficient poverty to make such a deal favorable is a terrible thing, and I'd agree with that. However, destroying Foxconn's business model by preventing them from selling to western countries does nothing directly to fix these people's poverty; in fact it makes it worse, by reducing the pool of jobs available to them (and not just randomly reducing it; you're taking away some of the best jobs in the pool!).
As an analogy, think of how you'd react if people in a hypothetical country that's even more wealthy than your's decided that your working conditions are far too horrible for your pay, and somehow stopped jobs like the one you have right from being offered anymore, resulting in you having to choose a worse job instead. Would that make your life better? Would you be happy about it? It's the same thing here.
The above is how the simple economic argument goes. Real economies and societies are complicated, of course, and there's several vectors by which driving Foxconn out of business oculd potentially improve the situation for common workers in China. But those aren't clear to me (and aren't clear to various other people who've looked at the issue) - the direct, obvious and robust effect is strongly negative. If you're going to argue that there are other effects compensating for it, it would be good to present your reasoning or link to other people arguing for the above reasoning being incorrect.
Still need to know if you've passed the six month mark yet. ^_^
Fair enough, I should have been more specific there. I've been using the system I'm writing this on (and mentioned in my previous post) since April 2011, and it was a replacement for another Intel GPU notebook which I had been using since August 2009. So that's a bit over 2 years on Intel GPUs, now. :)
And how is the OpenCL support on those GPUs?
I haven't had a reason to look very hard for it, but as far as I can tell the answer is "nonexistent". According to Intel's relevant FAQ entry they don't support running OpenCL code on any of their IGPs, including the newest and fanciest Sandy Bridge chips. They do have an implementation to run OpenCL on the CPU instead. I have no idea if using that approach gets you any performance benefits over just running equivalent x86_64 code on the same CPU.
I have yet to encounter anyone who has gone 6 months with an actual machine with an integrated Intel graphics chip-set, and not have them hunger for something better.
Hello lightknight, nice to encounter you.
I've been using Intel GPUs, specifically the Core 2 generation of them (my current one reports as "Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller"; using i915 kernel driver) for quite a while now. The computer I write this on also has an ATI GPU, but I've disabled that one permanently since the drivers are just too much of a pain to work with. The Intel GPU does what I need, and it does it with a minimum amount of fuss and instability.
I aggressively avoid anything made by nvidia, since the free drivers situation for their hardware is even worse than with ATI/AMD.
Reports are that the Sandy Bridge GPUs are even better than Intel's earlier hardware generations, and that's definitely what I'll buy and use for my next systems. :)
While you probably said this in irony, you are in fact, absolutely correct: There is such a history. See the appropriate wikipedia page for a short list of examples.
I didn't mean to imply that you were lying. I was specifically worried about the NTS possibility since ESR is fairly well kown for his views among geekish libertarians, and so it struck me as relatively unlikely that someone with your understanding of the subject would be unaware of the existence of anarchist+libertarian views, to the extent of concluding that the association a result of propaganda from people opposed to libertarianism. :)
I apologize if this came across as unnecessarily confrontational; no personal attacks were intended.
I'm glad my post was informative for you
You make some good points. That said:
That can be fixed. Take a look at ESR's take on this:
Please don't respond with "anyone who says this isn't a real libertarian" unless you have very specific arguments that prevent it from falling into the category of No True Scotsman.
There are self-described libertarians who are also self-described anarchists. From the way many of them talk (see e.g. that FAQ), I have no particular reason they are twisting words either when calling themselves 'libertarian' nor when calling themselves 'anarchist'. Anarchism is an extreme of libertarian thought, but it is definitely part of the spectrum.
I thought the "dying in the fields" phrasing was an exaggeration you used for dramatic effect, but apparently it didn't originate with you. The argument I was talking about, which is a fairly standard libertarian one (and there's a good chance you've heard it anyway; I just want to avoid possible misunderstandings), runs roughly as follows:
1. Individual situations and lives are complex. Whether a voluntary exchange of goods is a net positive for someone depends on a lot of factors, many of which are much easier to evaluate for the individual involved than for any outside observer. The individual in question also typically has better incentives for getting the answer right than a third party, which (among other things) helps safeguard against many kinds of irrationality.
2. Therefore, not hurting people directly through commercial transactions is usually quite simple: Don't apply force, and be honest. Obviously forcing people into transactions is bad; robbing or raping people is clearly immoral. The same goes for defrauding them in voluntary transactions (by lying about your product, paying them with counterfeit money, or whatever).
3. Aside from those two obvious things, you're usually best off focusing on whether a given possible deal is good for you. If everyone does that, you get the people with the best information judging the efficiency of transactions, and most of such transactions will then end up mutually beneficial.
4. For similar reasons, judging that a given deal between two third party entities is directly morally bad requires that at least one of them is applying force, engaging in fraud, or catastrophically irrational (and also catastrophically more irrational than the actor making the judgement; unfortunately, it's very common for people to erroneously settle on this explanation). This is the standard argument as to why corporations running sweatshops (assuming the work contracts are voluntary, they don't inordinately pollute the environment, etc.) aren't necessarily doing anything immoral, and AFAIK it is valid.
Now, this is just about the direct moral consequences on the actors involved. By engaging in honest voluntary transactions, you might still be doing indirect harm by supporting an evil business. If you buy stuff from Sony, you're indirectly supporting DRM. If you buy NetApp devices, you're indirectly supporting software patent litigation. And if you do business with slavetraders, you're indirectly supporting slavery.
If you were making this last point, then fair enough, but note that this really only applies where you expect your money to go to an evil organization - when you're dealing with someone who's just voluntarily (i.e., not being coerced through threat of violence by other individuals or similar) offering sexual services for money, there's nothing morally wrong about doing business with them.
This also doesn't necessarily conflict with libertarian ideology very much. Libertarians don't typically condone forcing people into transactions, and many would agree that there's a role for government in preventing literal slavery (but note that "wage slavery" is really a horrible misnomer, and I'm not including that concept here).
Since you brought the "he-may-be-interned-in-a-factory-but-at-least-he's-not-dying-in-the-fields" argument up, it's safe to assume you've read/heard reasonable explanations of it, including why it works and how exactly the naive alternatives fail - so I won't repeat those here.
I consider the aforementioned argument valid (and think it also applies to the situation depicted in your image). You have neither explained how/why it fails on theoretical grounds, nor provided specific empirical evidence for it failing in practice.
A rejection this argument is a core part of the reasoning you outlined in your post, but I am aware of no effective rebuttals to it. If you have some, please provide them. Either original research or links to existing material are fine.
I disagree completely. Rummaging through my personal mass storage is a far more egregious violation of my personal rights than looking at every angle of my naked body (embarassing (and unpleasant for the observer) as that may be). Contrary to going over my primary mass storage, looking at my naked body doesn't tell you any of:
1. My stored passwords or other auth data (think SSH private keys).
2. My political views.
3. My taste in entertainment, pornography related or otherwise.
4. My browsing history.
5. My personal conversations going back half a decade.
6. Who my personal acquaintances are and their contact information.
7. What kind of work I do.
8. What kind of software I like to write in my free time, for my own use only.
Looking at my naked body doesn't come anywhere close in invasiveness, unless I wipe any and all remotely personal data on all storage devices I move through customs (I can always dowload it again later). Which I'll probably end up doing, when moving to or from any country with such egregious policies.
I agree with most of what you've written, but this is dubious:
Actually, all else being equal small banks have a stability disadvantage. A concentrated customer base means you're less diversified, more exposed to local economic shocks, and more vulnerable to any economic shock because you have less of a capital buffer.
FDIC unfairly advantages small banks by removing stability from the set of criteria customers care about. There are significant stability advantages to being a big organization, but no bank customer will care about those if all of their deposits are insured anyway.
Well, sure, but why should any of us pressure google into helping people in general to keep this stuff secret from insurers, then? It's not like we'll get them to only keep our own information private; this going to apply to all of the insurance company's customers, and we (like all their other customers) will be hit by the globally higher premiums.
I can see why the subset of people who are currently exploiting this information asymmetry for profit (i.e. people with above-average risks who can keep that fact secret) would like to pressure google for more confidentiality about this, but everyone else shouldn't.
It's kinda like saying "I like to sell people lemons, so google should really not return any results related to the state of specific used cars, because that hurts my special interest." Lemon seller would like that, pretty much everyone else wouldn't, so why would people in general possibly support that kind of thing?
And just as a reminder, none of this touches concerns about keeping data from the government or employers, it's just about the "keep insurers in the dark" part. The other concerns would have to be addressed seperately, and I happen to think that keeping personal data out of the government's hands is in fact, a good idea.
I'm with you on the governments and mostly on the employers (though one could argue that the latter are less important, since the market would tend to weed out inefficient discrimination).
But ... why insurance companies? The idea of risk insurance is that you pay a large entity some money so as to put an upper bound on the worst things that might happen to you - i.e. there's some low-probability high-damage risks in your life (or venture), and you'd like to reduce the variance from those events. If you go into an insurance contract knowing something about the probability of the risk that the insurer doesn't, you're just trying to rip them off. And the insurance company will know about that possibility, adjust for it, and as a result demand higher premiums from all their customers, because their ability to tell the ones that are hiding information from the ones that aren't is imperfect. That ends up with people with a normal risk that want to buy a policy subsidizing those people that know privately that they have an elevated risk level. And of course then that leads to second order effects, with that kind of system attracting people with elevated risks, leading to higher premiums for everyone, etc.
Insurance works better if the insurance company has a good understanding of the risks they're actually insuring people against. Unilaterally withholding information of them can make individual sense, but is ultimately a negative-sum game.
Trivial to fix: Hand out as many ballots to each voter as they ask for, but only allow them to drop one envelope into the urn. They can make as many fake votes as they want, and photograph them however they like, but there's no way for them to prove they really dropped whatever they photographed into the urn, as opposed to throwing it away and filling out another ballot with their real vote.
<sarcasm>Yes, and by the same token we should disallow the use of airplanes cars and bicycles for people who are physically capable of travelling the distance under their own power, no matter the cost or effort.</sarcasm>
What would be so bad about the scenario you describe?
Taking good care of human muscles is a time-consuming, high-effort activity that many people don't find especially pleasurable, and that in fact isn't worth the results according to their own judgement. Historically people have increasingly offloaded activities previously done by human muscles to machines, freeing up time and energy to do other, more productive or pleasurable things.
I'd want one of those suits. Well, not right now, because right now they're still very expensive and likely error prone, but I'd definitely want one for daily use once they're in mass production and the major problems have been worked out. And not just for the sheer nerdiness.
Who are you to decide for people what they should and shouldn't offload to machines? If these things get good and cheap enough, they will be used by a large part of the population, who will be happier and more productive as a result. The people who use them will happily pay the price to make and maintain the machines, just as we currently pay the price to do the same with cars. And we'll all be better off as a result.
That's completely wrong. is not tests for identity, != tests for equality. For instance:
>>> True != 1
False
>>> True is not 1
True
Personally, I also think 'is not' is a horrible name for a python operator. Without this operator, the expression 'X is not Y' would still be valid Python, with a meaning equivalent to 'X is (not Y)' - which has a different meaning from 'X is not Y' in Python. Therefore, 'is not' could well be confusing to people who don't know it, but do know the other python operators. IMO, 'isnot' would have been a much better choice.
<sarcasm>Umm, yeah, that would work great.</sarcasm> Less facetiously, it would indeed have been possible to make things secure using SSL; but just using it isn't enough, at least as long as you use standard certificate authorities for auth. If you make your own, this particular crack probably wouldn't hit you.
Well, right at this moment it costs
This is just an ipv6-through-ipv4 tunnel offer, so you do need working ipv4 connectivity to use it. Actual native ipv6 connectivity usually isn't gratis - but then the same applies for ipv4 uplinks.
Global ipv4 addresses may be expensive, but ipv6 ones really aren't, and unless ISPs start introducing completely artificial scarcity on that front (which they might, being greedy businesses and all) they're not going to become scarce in the forseeable future.
It's a matter of computing a conditional probability given certain evidence. Say you are only interested in the following two hypotheses:
K: defendant obtained the key knowing what it was, and is trying to pass it off as coincidence
N: The output really was coincidental.
The string matching the known key is a result of an empirical test; let's call that
X: String matches a certain AACS key
Say you are willing to give the defendant the benefit of the doubt, and assume that of every 100 people to bring this argument in court, only one is lying. So you get the prior probabilities:
P(N) = 0.99
P(K) = 0.01
The conditional probability fox X given that N is correct is easy to compute, and extremely small:
P(X | N) = 1 / (2**128) =~ 2.94e-39
The other one is rather harder...but let's be conservative again, and assume that given intention to get at the key, the defendant only has a 10% chance of getting the right one. This is probably way too low. A realistic, higher, estimate, would result in a higher posterior probability of the defendant having gotten the key on purpose.
P(X | K)
We can now apply Bayes' Theorem to get at the probability we're interested in:
P(K | X) = P(X | K)*P(K) / (P(X|K) * P(K) + P(X|N) * P(N)) =~ 0.1*0.01 / (0.1*0.01 + 2.94e-39*0.99) =~ 1
The last approximate equality is so close to 1 that the double floating-point arithmetic performed by the CPU of the system I'm writing this on doesn't know the difference anymore.
Which means, that for all intents and purposes, even with the very defendant-friendly assumptions we've been making, the chance of these numbers matching by accident is so astronomically unlikely, that it's effectively certain that N is wrong.
You'll have a much better chance to covince any halfway-statistically competent court that someone framed the defendant by replacing their dd or kernel binary to output this key all the time (a possibility asider from either K or N), than you will of convincing them that this was a coincidence.
The output is pretty clearly that of a shell script being executed with 'set -x'. There's quite a bit of debug output there; aside from that, it seems to be doing little aside from setting a few environmental variables.
The ldd call would make sense for debug output, but interestingly it doesn't print anything like what ldd would. In fact, it likely isn't the usual ldd(1), but another binary that happens to have the same name; especially since the debug output stops there, suggesting that it didn't return and the following output was generated by that ldd process, or its children.
The Debug output could have been deactivated with a 'set +x', but before the deactivation went through that command itself would have been printed, so that's out. What is possible, though, is that the ldd was in fact the last command executed in a subshell, and the parent (which wasn't even necessarily a shell), wasn't set up to produce that kind of debug output.
A search for "seatapps" brings up very few results, those apparently being first-hand accounts of people who have seen similar screens during a flight, suggesting that the whole setup, as you suggested, highly specific and non-standard.
However, an arbitrary given algorithm (i.e. program) can not be proved to compute (or not compute) an arbitrary computable function. This is a fundamental result of theoretical Computer Science; solving this problem would be equivalent to solving the Halting Problem. This algorithmic unsolvability is commonly known as Rice's theorem.